


UnDead

by PoorYorick



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, Cannibalism, Dehumanization, Erik has Issues, Even my made-up science is pretty made-up, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Medical Horror, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Antisemitism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trust Issues, or more generally:
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-10-26 13:09:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10787346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoorYorick/pseuds/PoorYorick
Summary: After escaping the hell that is the laboratory of mad scientist Sebastian Shaw, the only thing on Erik's mind should be revenge on the man who tortured him and turned him into a zombie. There's just one problem: Zombies need brains and brains are hard to come by. Suspiciously helpful pathologist Charles Xavier is more than willing to give him what he needs, but Erik is convinced that all help comes with a price tag attached.





	1. Post Mortem

Erik woke up to white, artificial light blinding him, its source swimming above his head.

His mind instantly began to race, overwhelmed by the various smells around him, dissecting the macabre mixture of decay, peppermint, blood, antiseptic soap, metal and several human brains whose whispered to him of their ages and sizes and their state of health. One was still alive and working, the others in various states of decay, but all still edible. 

Almost everything was edible when you were hungry and Erik was always hungry. 

Perks of being a zombie.

The sole living brain was the one closest to him and once his eyes had gotten used to the light, he could make out its owner leaning over him.

A man who - judging by the looks of it - was just about to sink a scalpel into Erik’s chest right above the heart, too focused on his task to notice that the body beneath him had begun moving and was now looking straight at him. For the fraction of a second Erik had expected to see Shaw, expected to find himself back in that place, strapped to a table in one of his basement laboratories, the last months nothing but a strange, drug-induced dream - But instead the man above him was younger than Shaw, pale skin contrasting with dark hair and blue eyes that seemed to glow in the pale light above. 

The monster had awoken along with Erik, clawing at his insides to just grab the man, crush his head open and eat, eat, eat...

Erik cleared his throat.

The man above him hesitated, then looked around and over his shoulder, as if expecting to see an intruder, someone who’d walked in on this scene. Only then did his eyes wander back to the body in front of him and slowly towards Erik’s face.

Their eyes met and for good measure, Erik winked.  
He wasn’t the type for winking - in fact, he was sure it made him look more demented than anything else - but the effect was well worth it. The scalpel slid from the man’s grasp and clattered onto the edge of the metal table and from there to the ground without him even seeming to notice. Seconds ticked by on the man's wrist-watch until the man began to comprehend the situation. A trembling hand reached for his neck to take his pulse, but Erik grabbed it by the wrist before he could touch him.

“Don’t.”

The man froze, his mouth opening and closing and his mind obviously struggling to make sense of what was happening.

Erik gave him time to find his speech.

“Y-You were dead. Just a few minutes ago, you...you didn’t have a pulse. You had a kn- You were dead when they you found you - there’s is a death certificate…”  
“I’ll put with the others.” The other man opened his mouth to argue, but Erik had already swung his legs off the cold metal table he'd been placed on. “Is there anything I need to sign to check myself out?”  
“You mean to say that this is not...the first time something like this happened to you?”  
The man almost managed to sound professional about this and even if medical professionalism was his go-to mode when the situation seemed out of hand, Erik couldn’t help but commend him for it. 

“I’m fine. And I want to leave.”

He tried to stand up, but the pathologist blocked his path, his hands reaching out, ready to push him back down onto the table. Or at least - ready to try. Erik had little doubt that he could overpower him easily in a fair fight. Rational thought didn’t help much against the irrational spike of fear he felt at the sight of a white coat, erie pale light and of gloved hands reaching for him from above.  
Maybe the pathologist had noticed his flinch, because his hands retreated and when he spoke, his voice was calm and collected.

“You are fine, because you woke up before I cut into your chest, cracked your rips open, removed your inner organs, measured them, weighed them, put them back in and stuffed you with toilet paper.”

“Nothing of what you just said wants to me to spend more time with you.” He looked down his deathly pale - and stark naked - body. “Where are my clothes?”

“Shepherd's Bush Police Station, I fear.” 

“Wonderful.”

The pathologist shook his head again, but this time he managed to look disappointed in a way that might have looked right on a teacher. Or a professor. 

“I could have killed you.” He said that in such a concerned voice, as if it truly meant something if he had. As if killing Erik would truly have been a bad thing. As if he or anyone else would even have noticed, when working under the assumption that Erik was already dead to begin with. As if he could have killed him permanently. As if-  
His thoughts were caught in a loop. A sure sign that he needed to eat. Healing always left him hungry.

Something caught Erik’s eye - a silver something on a table behind the man. A stethoscope.

“How about this - I’ll let you examine me. If you say I’m fine, I’ll walk out of here. If you say there is anything wrong - I’ll see any doctor you want.”

“You dropped dead for no apparent reason. That should be proof enough that…”

“Not proof enough for me.”

Another huff and - if that was possible - the man looked even more disappointed than before. But he gave in, turning around for the stethoscope.  
The second the pathologist had turned around, Erik single-handedly lifted the cast-iron lamp next to the table and swung it. It made a truly awful sound when it onnected with the other man’s head and knocked him out cold before he hit the ground as a crumpled heap in a white lab coat, missing the edge of the table by the wall only through sheer luck.

Erik sniffed the air around him.

Food. He needed food. He didn’t know how long he had been out - or what exactly had happened to him - but the hunger was worse than usual and that wasn’t a good sign.  
He had seen what would happen to him if he didn’t feed. He’d seen them in the labs, empty husks with only hatred and ravenous hunger to keep them going. When he got angry he could feel it as well, could feel the hunger clouding his mind, leaving nothing more than wrath and hunger.

Painfully aware of his own nudity, he slid off the table and looked down onto the unconscious man in front of him. He was smaller than Erik and narrower around the shoulders. He’d have to get his clothes elsewhere.  
Grabbing the man beneath the shoulders, he picked him up effortlessly and laid him down on the table. He didn’t even stir, but his brain didn’t smell damaged to Erik.  
Actually, the pathologist had a very healthy brain, for someone whose liver smelled faintly of cirrhosis. 

The front of his lab coat had a badge with his name on it.

Charles Xavier, MD. A name that sounded familiar and yet he couldn’t place it. 

“I do apologise, Dr Xavier.”

By the wall stood a tray with a collection of scalpels and surgical instruments. Erik picked up the bonesaw and marvelled at it, before switching it on, feeling morbidly civilised, opening up a skull the way they were supposed to. The hissing sound of the saw echoed back from the tiled walls and made his hair stand on end, but at the same time he was fascinated by such a useful instrument.  
Time for breakfast. 

He sucked in the air around him, the sweet, fleshy smell of Xavier's living brain stronger than anything else. It almost made him dizzy and his mouth water...

No.

In the cold chamber behind him he could smell the dead body of a young woman, no older than thirty and apart from some traces of decay, her brain was in a perfect state, no signs of illness and a temporal lobe to die for.  
He pushed the thought of what had become of him aside and pulled open the drawer with the body of the young woman inside, allowing himself to mourn what would happen to her bright red hair, before getting to work, removing the top of her scalp with the bonesaw. Handling the electrical saw wasn’t as instinctive as he expected and the hole he left in her skull was uneven, but it didn’t matter. He needed to eat

The taste of the young woman - now back in her drawer - still filling his mouth and clearing his mind and giving his body the energy it needed after healing whatever injuries he had suffered - he searched the morgue for spare clothes. All he found were some scrubs that made him look even paler than he was, but at least he’d be able to move unnoticed through the hospital and find the exit.  
As a last souvenir, he nicked the keys from Xavier’s desk.


	2. Goldhawk Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I have nothing but love for the London Tube and I do not share any of the negativity expressed here

Three Days Earlier had found Erik in the Tube, squeezed in between a middle-aged woman in a pastel-coloured business-suit absent-mindedly skimming through the Evening Standard and a adolescent with purple hair who tortured Erik’s heightened senses with the music blaring from his headphones. Erik considered strangling the boy with them, until his brain was cut-off from oxygen and the neurons fired their last sparks when Erik cracked his skull open and sunk his teeth into his auditory cortex right in front of the other passengers.

 

The Tube seemed like the appropriate place to start the zombie apocalypse. Who’d be able to tell the difference to the usual early-morning commuters?

Taking a deep breath, he pulled his hood deeper into his face, trying to blend out the sound of long nails clacking on the screens of smartphones and the smell of the woman opposite to him who had to be working at a perfumery - there was no other explanation for this explosion of contradictory scents. He could hardly smell her brain over this mixture of dozens of different inconsistent flowery and musky smells.

His target was still there. A thin man in a dark suit who had been pretending to read the Tube-map above the windows opposite to him ever since they got on the train and who was probably unaware of the beginnings of a bitter-smelling bacterial abscess in his brain.

Only when the mechanical voice announced White City as the next station he looked up. ( _“This Is A Central Line Train To Ealing Broadway, Please Mind The Gap!”_ , the voice recited, because it wanted Erik to suffer. It knew what he was, where he was and wanted to punish him with that constant, grating repetition. Involuntarily, his teeth snapped at nothing, earning himself a few odd looks, while he wished he could grab that voice somehow and make it shut up.)

At White City, his target got off and Erik allowed him a safe headstart before following after him.

He was surrounded by the vibrant smells of different brains, desperately focussing on the back of the man’s head, following it through the masses like a beacon (a disgusting beacon with a bacterial abscess) to Wood Lane where he got on the next train ( _"This Is A Circle Line Train..."_ ), because apparently the cosmos wasn’t willing to spare Erik purgatory just because he was still walking about instead of lying somewhere in a peaceful cool grave.

The coaches here were almost empty and Erik made sure to use a different door than his target and to then turn his back on him, only concentrating on the man’s smell and the noises he made to keep track of him.

People had many misconceptions about zombies. Or possibly they didn't - after all the zombies in films and books had been there before Shaw had labelled his creations as such. But either way people believed zombies were stupid, brainless creatures.

Erik hadn't noticed any significant loss of cognitive function ever since he became what he was now, except when he was famished and anxious for a brain.

But...he'd always had a habit of overlooking the obvious.

Only when the voice announced Goldhawk Road ( _“This Is A Circle Line Train!”_ ), his overloaded brain noticed that something was amiss.

Goldhawk Road was _his_ station. The station where he got on and off whenever he could afford the Tube to chase Shaw’s cronies around the city or looked for people who deserved to be his next meal.

And of course this was where his target moved to get off, the target he had found out about after he threatening to remove every single tooth from one of Shaw’s accomplices’ mouth, the target he’d been following the entire day and this was where he was headed.

He weighed his options. Staying on the train or getting off and following the man.

If they had found his hiding place, he needed to know, he had to be prepared.

( _"This Is A Circle Line Train-"_ )

He got off before Phil Sayer could remind him to _Mind The Gap_ and followed his target up the stairs onto the open street where he instantly headed down the familiar path towards Sulgrave Road. Erik was careful to keep his eyes on the ground, the hood deep into his face and the distance between them inconspicuous, using the few others pedestrians between them for cover.

A buzz of static...

_“It’s not inside the building.”_

The voice was so faint, Erik had almost missed it.

_“It’s behind you.”_

The source was easily identified - It came from his target. But it wasn’t his own voice.

Erik could see him raise his hand to his ear.

_“It’s following you!”_

The target was turning around, his eyes scanning his environment for ‘it’, his hand still hovering above his earphone.

‘It’, Erik realised, was him - of course ‘it’ was him -

He hardly had any time to be offended at being dehumanised in such a manner (and on some level, they probably had a point), because his target was turning around.

Erik took cover behind a group of chattering tourists before the target could spot him and listened for more instructions via the target’s earphones, but none came.

Instead he heard the sound of glass shattering on pavement exactly from where the man’s smell came - which was suddenly covered by another scent, a stronger scent. A smell that consumed all others, that of the cars passing by, that of the canalisation below, and that of the smoke in the air - the smell of the city that he had learnt to associate if not with peace then with safety.

The smell of human brain matter surrounded him now, stronger than it had ever been before, sweet and fleshy and everywhere and yet non-distinct. It smelt of old and of young, of cancer and dementia - The monster inside him was screaming and clawing. He was dizzy, his cold flesh suddenly burning hot and the world turning red before his eyes.

Suddenly the only thing he could concentrate on was the smell and the people around him who didn’t notice anything, didn’t notice this smell, his hunger was tearing at him…

_Mindless beasts in cages, their flesh rotting away, snapping teeth, twitching limbs, clawing hands and their eyes were empty, dead…_

Erik forced himself to focus, pressed his jaws together and balled his fists, kept walking as if nothing were wrong.

His target was no longer where Erik had last seen him - the only trace of him was a broken vial from which the smell of _foodnowhunger_ came, a few drops of fluid on the pavement sent out these dizzying waves, a few drops enough to consume his mind, luring out the beast that he was trying to keep in check at any moment.

Suddenly he smelled something bitter, familiar … His target with the brain abscess.

Erik turned just in time to see the man right next to him, his hand shooting forward towards his neck. There was a flash of silver and electric crackling and a slight sting and then he could feel his muscles slacken and his sight fade to darkness.

 

* * *

 

Three Days Later

 

* * *

 

No rotten hole can ever quite live up to the rotten hole we call home. Not that Erik considered himself overtly attached to his tiny attic flat in Hammersmith. His few earthly possessions were stowed away in bags and backpacks, ready to be picked up at a moment’s notice. What he did enjoy was the thick insulation of the walls that served to keep some of the outside-noises out and the high-capacity refrigerator he had stolen from his late landlord.

Still dressed in his equally stolen hospital scrubs and a similarly obtained coat, Erik made his way up the narrow, wooden stairs, the familiar groan of each step beneath his feet music to his ears. He opened the door with the spare-key he unimaginatively hid inside the pot of a dead palm tree on the ground floor. With no money on him and his borrowed Oyster Card lost, he had to walk all the way from the hospital near the Scrubs to his little apartment in Sulgrave Road, trying not to scratch, bite, eat or infect anyone.

Which would be a Bad thing, because humans were Good and Nice and because there were enough Hollywood studios who'd inevitably sue him for copyright violations if he infected someone and started the reign of the undead.

Couldn’t afford that.

The bustling streets of London were a buffet to him and he was a starving man with nothing but willpower to keep him from taking a bite.

He was always hungry, every second of every day. Even when he’d just eaten, he felt starved, ready to sink his teeth into the next human’s neck, tackle them to the ground, ready to crack their skulls open and scrape out the insides.

If he didn’t feed, it became worse. And he feared the day he would lose control; the day his hunger would take over his mind, take over him and destroy him.

He locked and bolted the door behind him, as if it could keep the city out, as if he could no longer smell the brains of the people living beneath him, as if he could no longer smell the pigeon sitting on the roof above or the mouse eating its way through the insulation in the wall behind the shower. The brains of animals didn’t even get the job done, did nothing to stave off the hunger - been there, done that - and yet his instincts felt the constant need to remind him of their presence.

He put the stolen keys to the morgue down in the middle of the kitchen table. A promise. If the streets of London were the buffet he couldn’t touch, these were the keys to the fridge.

Inside his own, actual fridge were the remains of his landlord, a man who had managed to convince the police that the death of his wife had been accident, but hadn’t managed to convince the zombie three floors above. So far, disposing of his body had proven to be difficult, underlining the irony that was the (after-)life of the modern-day zombie. The cities were full of temptations but with little unguarded spots wherein to discard your bodies. The countryside had hiding places in abundance- but prey was limited.

That, and it didn’t have _him_.

Shaw.

The man he lived to kill.

The thought of Shaw made red-hot anger coil inside his stomach and he snapped his teeth at the thin air - another habit he had picked up after death. He considered unfreezing a few of Mr. Ken’s limbs and take a bite out of those. But as much as the taste of human flesh could sooth his nerves, he didn’t want to have his body grow accustomed to having more food than necessary. Rather save those for scarce times, when there were no brains around and he needed something to take the edge off.

Instead he switched on the telly, already set to the lowest possible volume, and made himself comfortable on his thin mattress beneath the only window and let his mind drift away until he was sunken into a thoughtless, almost vegetative state - the only substitute he had left for sleep.

He missed dreaming.

 

 

* * *

 

 

For his body, there was no slow transition from ‘sleeping’ to 'waking' state.

His body snapped back to full awareness the moment his body had fully recuperated.

In a split-second he absorbed the time on the clock on the microwave (9:23), the date visible on the background of the news-segment currently shown on tv (2.10.16.) and the spider happily scuttling across his face (quickly flicked away under the heater beneath the windowsill).

He was brimming. Both with energy and with hunger - admittedly, it was becoming increasingly hard to discern the two.

He had a strange appetite for sweet, sugar-coated pastries, a preference which he blamed on the brain he had consumed yesterday. Not that he would be able to taste them if he indulged the craving- while all his other senses had gone into overdrive ever since he had transitioned into this zombie-state, his sense of taste was now limited to various shades of ‘cardboard’.

Instead he popped a handful of appetite suppressants and and smoked a few cigarettes to take the edge off his hunger.

He took a long shower - enjoying the warmth even a lukewarm shower could provide his cold body with and then focussed his attention on the central aspects of his life:

His hunger and his revenge.

And right now he could focus his attention on the latter. At least until Xavier fessed up to the theft and the hospital exchanged the locks to the morgue.

Shaw knew where he lived (well...not lived in the most literal sense, but…) which meant he had to find a new place to _stay_. Not easy with no money to his name and his former landlord dead in the fridge.

The most important question now was - What had happened between his target knocking him out and his return to consciousness?

The keys to that answer were still lying on the kitchen table.  


 

* * *

 

In the laboratories, there had been no way to tell the hour, the day or the year.

Suffering had been timeless; endless. Time was promises and illusions.

With no way of telling the day of his parents’ death, he had said kaddish whenever his mind had been clear enough to recall the necessary words and he felt as if another eternity had to have passed.

The holidays that had meant so much to him as a child had come and passed without any way of telling, without any divine indication.

Freedom had become a mere illusion and what concentration he could muster up on a vision of celebrating Rosh Hashanah again was distorted by his hunger; any contemplation of meaning, any memory of his parents distant, blurred and constantly out of grasp.

It was easier to think of apples and honey, tzimmes, of his mother’s sweet challah and of the baklava Cemal from the kebab shop down the road would slip him on the way home from school.

His hands were trembling when he lit the candles today, for the first time in years and his voice were shaking when he recited the kiddush, his fingers wrapped hard enough around his cup of wine to make the bones of his knuckles stick out even more.

He had some foods for mezonot in the cupboard, but hadn’t thought to buy challah before his abduction and now he didn’t have the money or the oyster card to afford a ride to Mayfair - much less afford to shop there.

It felt wrong, everything felt wrong and he knew that the wrongness had nothing to do with any of these shortcomings - it was him.

The few holidays he had been given with his parents had never been perfect - he remembered the hassle of asking for permission to go home earlier they had faced every time, he remembered the poverty weighing his parents down, the long way to the next shul- but despite everything these memories stood out as some of his fondest, bright stars in a velvet-black sky. They were memories of belonging. Of safety.

The wrongness wasn’t in the world around him, in came from the inside, eating its way out and reminding him of what he was and what he lost. He had no more faith inside him and if he did, it would only have told him that his name was further from the Book of Life than it had ever been.

He was going through empty motions, trying to re-create a mere shadow of a life which seemed so distant now that sometimes he wondered whether it really used to be real not just a strange, pleasant dream his sub-conscious had come up with.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Erik didn’t know the working hours of a pathologist, but he had firmly expected the mortuary to be empty by midnight. Instead he opened the door to the morgue to the scent of a familiar brain and the sight of the body carrying it around inside its skull.

Xavier was sitting in a chair right opposite to the door, legs crossed, a book in his lab and looking straight at Erik - this time less disappointed and more...reproachful. Erik still thought he’d make a good teacher - it helped that he had exchanged his lab coat for a beige, three-piece-suit. Erik suppressed an old twinge of self-consciousness at the sight of a man in a suit like that. Growing up on a high-rise estate in Garath, suits and men wearing them were alien. Something he'd see on television or in newspapers. They were politicians, doctors or judges in a court of law. He pushed the last thought to the back of his mind, where it belonged.

Erik still felt underdressed in his leather jacket and the oversized hoodie beneath it. There was power in clothes and Erik hated being powerless.

Xavier put his book aside, but Erik caught a glimpse of its title. _Suspended Animation In Humans_.

“I was waiting for you.”

“I can see that,” Erik said, his mind already working on a lie befitting the occasion.

“Well, you stole my keys. I figured you would be back for more." 

“More of what?” Or semi-convincing innocence.

“Brains of course. I hardly think you will find human brains at your local Tesco." He raised his hand and pointed at something laying beside him on the table. A camera. “We record the post mortem here. It’s actually very hard holding a pen when your hands are covered in body fluids. The camera was still filming when you opened the skull of Ms. Abati and...ate her brain.”

Erik sniffed the air. Other than Xavier, no living soul around. Or brain. Which at least suggested that Xavier hadn’t called the police. And yet, the man seemed at ease around Erik.

Xavier raised his hands, as if to show Erik that he was unarmed. “Please - There is no one here but us. You can trust me.”

“That’s an unexpected response to the whole...brain-eating-thing.”

“I figured you wouldn't eat them, if you didn't have to. You need to eat them, right? Like a...you know…” A vague hand gesture. At least Xavier had the decency to appear as if he himself couldn’t believe what he had just implied.

“Maybe I’m just psychotic," Erik suggested.

“You were dead, when you were brought here. Pronounced so independently by three doctors - including me. That seems like a very elaborate plan for anyone to gain access to brains, no matter how psychotic.”

“Or maybe I’m a junkie? The wrong dose of the wrong stuff...and my heart stopped. And I woke up with a craving for brains.”

Xavier raised a single brow.

“You were brain-dead as well. That’s nothing people just wake up from.” So Shaw had done it. Certainly not as he had imagined it, but he was coming closer, step by step. “There is something else.” Xavier said carefully.

“Tell me.”

“Certainly.”

Not that Erik knew much about all the services a morgue typically provided, but nothing of this seemed that straight-forward, but when Xavier got up from his chair and asked Erik to follow him, he did, past the tables and the drawers and into the little office where he had stolen the scrubs.

Xavier followed his eyes.

“Ah, yes. Is there any hope that you could return those? Before Dr Pratt notices that they went missing, preferably?”

“You wanted to show me something.”

Xavier shoulders sank and he looked disappointed once again, but he still turned towards the desk next to the wall of the small office and started searching through a stack of files until he pulled out one labelled ‘John Doe’ in crude block letters.

“That’s yours.” Without further explanation, Xavier took a small stack of photos from the file and put them down on the table, one after another.

“That’s how they found you.”

His own body, sprawled out on the pavement in the tattered remains of his clothes, with a knife sticking out of the centre of his chest. Photographs from several different angles and with signs with numbers on them scattered all around his body.

He looked the part of a proper murder-victim.

Xavier’s finger landed on the knife in his chest.

“When you were brought here, every trace of that injury was gone," Xavier explained. “It just healed.”

The best option would be to kill Xavier on the spot. To stab him in the chest, undress him, label him a John Doe and put him into one of his own drawers, switch off the cooling and wait for the decay to disfigure him beyond recognition so that he could replace Erik’s own missing body.

But of course that wouldn’t work, there were more people than him working here, they'd notice. He would have to get Xavier at home or somewhere secluded, make it look like a mugging gone badly…

But Charles Xavier was innocent. Erik didn’t kill innocent people.

“I haven’t told the police anything so far," Xavier said. “If that is what you’re worried about.”

“Where did they find my body?”

Xavier turned a different page of his file.

“Not far from here - West Acton. Goldsmith Avenue.”

If Shaw was behind this - and Erik had little doubt that he was, after being knocked out by one of the man’s cronies who had known exactly where Erik lived - he must have found a new hiding place. Or dumped Erik on a random road to throw him off. The other question was - why would Shaw let him go? He must even have fed him - healing was a pain, when he hadn’t eaten in a while, and yet the wound had faded while he was asleep. But Shaw had never cared whether Erik was in pain.

Perhaps he had thought Erik was now - irreversibly and unconditionally - dead.

“Does any of this make sense to you?” Xavier asked.

“No.” He didn’t know why he answered - even less why he answered honestly. The less Xavier knew the better. But all the pathologist did was nod patiently and sort his papers back into the file.

Then he stopped and looked at Erik, his brow slightly furrowed, looking thoughtful, like a chess-player considering a new move.

“I wrote a paper once," He finally said. “On how genetic mutation could stretch human healing abilities beyond anything that could be accomplished by natural or medical means. While I didn’t anticipate the consumption of brain-matter…”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I think I can help you.”

“I don’t need any help.”

“Someone did this to you. Perhaps I could find a way to reverse it,” Xavier’s voice trailed off. “...also I have access to as many brains as you need.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“Nothing. I’m a doctor. I swore an oath to heal people. You have a disease and there is no one else who can help you.”

A part of him wanted to trust Xavier and his blue, beseeching eyes, but he knew better. People couldn’t be trusted and least of all could doctors be trusted and no one ever did anything if they got nothing out of it.

“What would you need to do?”

“I’d...need samples. Do some research. I need to understand how this works and how it could be reversed. Or at least treated. It would take time. Lots and lots of time, I fear.”

Erik tried not to think of Shaw’s research. Tried not to see himself strapped down into a chair, watching IVs drip into his body and blades cut and nick away at his skin to retrieve samples or simply for Shaw to watch his flesh knit itself back together again to satisfy his scientific curiosity. Xavier couldn't be trusted. He was either working for Shaw or he was trying to conduct his own experiments, preparing a new ordeal for Erik.

But there was only one way to find out which it was and - if Xavier was working for Shaw - to use him to find Shaw.

“I accept your offer.”

“Splendid!” Xavier’s face brightened up at that as if Erik had done something wonderful for him and he stretched out his hand. “Dr Charles Xavier.”

Erik scrutinised the hand hovering between them, but then he shook it. Charles' skin was smooth and warm.

“Magnus Eisenhardt. A pleasure to meet you.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

If Charles Xavier really was working for Shaw he was either a lot more intelligent or a lot dumber than he appeared.

“You should come home with me," He had proposed in passing. “It's not far from here - just a trip down the street in case you ever feel...peckish.” That suggestion had almost made the proposal sound like a potentially long-term arrangement, but Erik had agreed and Dr Xavier (“Please, call me Charles!”) had appeared delighted. And maybe it was for the best. If he wanted to find out whether the man was working for Shaw, he couldn't leave him out of his sight, had to be ready when Shaw decided to make contact with him, and then he'd finally have him...

It turned out Xavier really did live closeby, no more than a three minute (and one-cigarette) walk down the street, filled with Xavier incessantly prattling about his job, home or how he was planning to cure Morbus Zombie. Not that Erik understood a word of what he said on that subject.

Erik took it as a sign that his new companion was nervous.

“And there we are!”

Xavier's house - not just a flat, they stood in front of an entire house, there was just one name on the door sign - would appear humble anywhere else, but Erik knew that by London-standards this was luxurious.

“It’s quite humble, I’m afraid.”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“But I have a sleep couch. You can sleep there...if you sleep. Do you sleep?” The way Xavier kept pretending that this was a long term arrangement implied that either he didn't know when Shaw would contact him or had his own trap prepared... “It’s very comfortable. At least my sister never complained when she was here.” A sister. Erik filed that information away with a question mark attached.

Then he decided to humour him.

“You want me to stay here?”

“Of course. I can’t find a cure to your little..problem...if I don’t know exactly what kind of influences you’re exposed to. And if you need to grab a bite - it’s just down the road. We don’t want any incidents, do we?”

Erik wanted to argue that there never had been any ‘incidents’, that he had never eaten anyone who didn’t deserve it (at least ever since it was no longer Shaw who controlled his diet. Who knew what and whom they had fed him in the labs), but he swallowed his anger down. Rather let Xavier be the one who feared him, feared the day he woke up to Erik cracking his skull open with a stapler.

After some fumbling with the keys - another sign of nervousness? - Xavier managed to open the door and Erik followed him inside and used Xavier's passionate tour of the house to verify that except for the two of them no one was here. He was likely planning to inform Shaw the moment Erik let him out of his sight and when they came, he’d be trapped here.

The living room Xavier let him into was big and would probably look the part, if the space wasn’t so efficiently used up by shelves full of books, stacks of books that obviously hadn’t fit _into_ the shelves, journals, folders and an honest-to-g-d blackboard full of equations and scribbles he couldn't make sense of.

With an apologetic attempt at a smile, Xavier picked up a few books from a table and - when he found no proper place to put them - deposited them on a different stack of books which started swaying perilously.

“I’m sorry. It’s a mess, I know. I’ll...clean it up. Not now, tomorrow perhaps...just...throw anything out that’s in the way. Make yourself at home.”

Erik’s ‘home’ had distinctly less things in it and you could hear the mice crawling behind the walls there and smell the pot one of the former residents must have smoked at an alarming rate. He decided not to make himself at home.

“And the kitchen is through here,”

In contrast to the living room the kitchen looked as if taken straight out of the IKEA-catalogue and then hardly used, except for a bin stuffed full of empty delivery boxes. Every surface was smooth, minimalist and polished and even the fridge hardly gave off any scent of food. Which was probably better than the smell of dead landlord.

“I’m...actually a good cook, but when you live alone...I know it’s a bad habit, but…”

Next to the kitchen sink stood a full knife block and Erik weighed his options, before choosing the filet knife over the cleaver and pulling it out.

Xavier halted in his description of all seven settings of his light switches and turned around.

“What are you doing?”

“There is something I need to ask.”

“Of course.” Xavier looked at him expectantly, seemingly unperturbed by the sight of the blade in his hand.

Erik tested the blade of the filet knife on his thumb and watched as as the blade sliced through his skin only for the bloodless cut to knit itself back together in a matter of seconds.

“Magnus?”

Xavier stepped closer and Erik struck too fast for the good doctor’s human reflexes to kick in, grabbing him by the throat and pushing face first down onto his own kitchen table. The confused protests ended swiftly when Xavier felt the filet knife pressing against his throat.

“And now you will tell me exactly - what happened to me and Where. Can. I. Find. Dr. Sebastian. Shaw?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the Rosh Hashanah scene with Erik's religious musings seems out of place, it's because it is. I put it in and left it out several times and now I'm putting it back in as an edit after posting the original chapter.   
> I was super-torn as how to do it/whether to do it.   
> On the one hand I'm always unhappy when fanfiction (or the movies *cough*) erase or ignore Erik's background, because it's so significant to his character - but at the same time I'm not Jewish and I hardly know any Jewish people to ask so what I know is the result of online research. I was also torn because it's difficult to gauge the cultural significance of religious customs from only reading and on the one hand, putting it in might be offensive af on the other hand it also seems insulting to write about Christian holidays and leave out all the other ones.  
> So...I dunno. I'm still pretty torn and if I did something wrong I apologise and I would probably take that part out if anyone asks. I probably fucked up and if I did, just tell me.


	3. No-Brainer

"Where. Can. I. Find. Dr. Sebastian. Shaw?"

Xavier was squirming in his grip, not trying to break free but shrinking away from the blade digging into his skin. Grabbing him by the hair, he slammed Xavier's head into the table, eliciting a choked noise of pain and panic that he tried to savour.

“Where is he? I know you’re working for him.”

“I’m...I’m not working for him.”

It was always the same grim sense of satisfaction when the men he interrogated finally betrayed themselves.

“So you do know him then?”

“I...I... _yes_ , I do know him," Xavier confessed. “But I don't know where he is, I’m…”

“What use do I have for you then?”

“I can…”

“Please don't tell me you can help me again, Dr Xavier. _You can't._ Only Shaw…”

“He doesn't know how to reverse it,” Xavier babbled, “He can't help you - I can. It was my idea. It was my idea that he stole. It was all my idea.”

Thoughtfully tapping the knife against Xavier's throat, Erik considered these words.

“What do you mean when you say it was ‘your idea’?”

“This would be much easier if you would stop holding a knife to my throat.” Xavier forced out with unexpected fervour, twisting in Erik’s grip, trying to push him off. Just to show his upper hand, Erik held him in place a second longer, before he removed the blade from Xavier's neck and lowered his mouth to the doctor’s ear.

“Just so we’re clear. You try to run - I’ll kill you. You lie to me - I kill you. You tell me the truth and I don’t like it - I kill you. You make any overused zombie-related puns-”

“You’ll kill me?” Xavier quipped, sounding strangely breathless.

“You catch on fast.”

He released his grip on Xavier's hair deliberately slow and pulled him upright by his shoulder - and the pathologist actually had the nerve to mutter _thanks_. Erik considered just slamming his head into the counter all over again, but judging by the redness on the left side of Xavier's face had already done enough damage to get across who was in charge here and it seemed the pathologist had accepted that-

“I’m sorry for being dishonest with you. I was sure you wouldn’t trust me if I told you I knew Shaw.”

“You were right.”

Xavier looked at him as if he was about to say something else, but instead he turned to one of his cupboards and took out two mugs.

“I’m going to make tea," He announced. “Do you want some?”

“I want you to tell me about Shaw.”

“I have Earl Grey and...only Earl Grey actually.”

“You will tell me. Right now.”

Xavier turned to him.

“Sugar?”

He looked unimpressed.

 

* * *

 

 

Five minutes later Erik found himself in a surprisingly comfy couch in Xavier living room - which he had hurriedly freed of several books, notepads, one abacus and a wrinkled cardigan.

A cup of tea was placed on the table in front of him.

“I didn’t say yes.”

“It’s from the same kettle as mine. It’s not poisoned.”

“It’s hot. I’m dead. My body heat is down to room temperature, anything warm I eat or drink feels like it’s burning a hole into the lining of my stomach for the next few hours.” Internally, Erik cursed himself. He had just given away one of his weaknesses to a man working for Sebastian Shaw. But then - Shaw knew about his sensitivity to heat very well. He remembered each torturous second that he spent locked in a heated metal box when Shaw had tried to ‘desensitise’ him, wishing he were able to die.

Xavier looked at him for a moment, then disappeared back into the kitchen and Erik could hear him open the fridge. There was rummaging. When his ‘host’ returned, he held three ice cubes in his bare hand and plopped them into Erik’s tea.

“Just give it a few minutes.” Xavier said, and sat down opposite to him in a chair. Erik considered telling that he didn’t have much of a sense of taste left either, but discussion seemed futile with this man - at least in matters regarding tea.

“Tell me about Shaw.”

Xavier added something to his tea from a bottle on the table between them - Erik’s nose rebelled at the sharp smell of hard liquor - before taking a sip.

“I used to be a professor for genetics at Oxford University," Xavier began. “That’s where I met Sebast...where I met Shaw. We were colleagues and we worked on a project together.”

When Erik had met Shaw, he had still been going by the name of Schmidt.

“What kind of project?”

Xavier carefully placed his cup on the table in front of him, either ignoring or overlooking the perfectly good coaster less than five centimetres next to it.

“I...I’ll try to explain this as simply as possible. I discovered an inactive gene in the human body. A gene that was also found in certain amphibians. In these animals the gene allows the regeneration of entire limbs.” There was a familiar light in Xavier’s eyes when he spoke of his scientific work, one that made Erik’s chest constrict and muscles tense. He had seen the same passion in Shaw.

“So?”

“I thought that if we could find a way to activate it in humans, it could serve a similar function. Shaw and I worked together and we created an otherwise harmless virus that would activate the gene. We were basically the mad scientists behind the zombie-apocalypse you see in the movies.”

“So you just started infecting people with your virus?”

“No! Of course not - There are protocols for these kind of things. We tested them in the lab - on rats.”

_“You know what I see when I look at you?” Shaw’s voice was echoing from the tiled walls. Erik hadn’t seen him enter. Couldn’t pay attention, everything hurt, every cell in his body was on fire, burning him like Shaw’s breath that was suddenly dancing against his neck. “I see a rat. A squeaky little lab rat.”_

Erik forced the memory back, took a deep breath to inhale the smell of tea and paper and the delectable brain sitting in Xavier's skull to take his mind off the imaginary stink of antiseptic and decay and Shaw’s aftershave filling his nose.

“Is everything alright?” Xavier asked, his blue eyes wide and concerned. If he was pretending to care, he was uncannily good at it. Or maybe Erik had just forgotten how it should look when someone actually cared.

Nodding, Erik reached for the cup in front of him and closed his hand around it and let the burning heat seep into his skin and radiate up his arm to ground him in reality.

“Keep talking. What happened with the rats?” He asked, ignoring the pain in his palm.

Xavier swallowed.

“They died,” He said. “Most of them. Others suffered mutations...they became...ill. Their wounds would heal as we expected them too and they kept on going even after their organs failed - but they became cannibalistic. They started attacking the others and ate them and when they ran out of food their body would necrotise and they became more and more...feral. For me it was the end of the project. I was disappointed of course - finding a mutation that could cure every injury had been so promising - modern alchemy, if you want - but I had no illusions as to how unlikely it was to ever work. It was Shaw who didn’t want to stop.”

“What did he do?” Erik asked and let the cup wander from his left hand to his right without having taken a single sip.

“Shaw’s theory was that the virus would work better on humans. He falsified our test results, pretended that in a new series of tests with an altered form of virus there hadn’t been any negative side-effects.”

“Why?”

“To apply for human trial. There are procedures and guidelines," Xavier explained and shrugged helplessly. “Being a mad scientist isn’t as easy as it used to be.”

“What a pity.”

“When I found out I reported him of course,” The pathologist continued. “And they said they would deal with it internally.”

“What happened?”

“He framed me. Said that I had falsified the test results in his name and had reported him when he found out. They couldn’t prove either and in the end we both lost our positions. They had pressured me into resigning and fired Shaw.  They said it would tarnish the reputation of Oxford.”

“Except that Shaw continued his work.”

“I had no idea, I swear.” And he really did sound sincere. Erik had to be careful he didn't drown in those blue eyes. Instead he looked down into his tea, which had cooled down somewhat. By now the ice had melted completely.

“How did you end up working in the morgue?”

A new expression came across Xavier face and there was something tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“You know why  I was so excited for this project?”

“You like sticking needles into sentient beings?”

The small smile disappeared from Xavier's face and Erik felt a tiny sting of guilt for some reason. Xavier was getting to him.

“No...No I wanted...I liked the idea that my work might actually help people. I was a scientist, I always liked learning new things - but the opportunity to actually help others was overwhelming. It didn’t take me long to study medicine with my biological knowledge.”

“And you figured the best place to _help_ people would be the morgue?”

Xavier rubbed the edge of the coffee table with the palm of his hand - a task seemingly so difficult that it demanded too much of the man’s attention to still be able to meet Erik’s eye.

“I...I couldn’t do it," It sounded like a confession. “There’s so much suffering in the world. Innocent people who are sick, get injured - and die. And I would see them and think what would have happened if I had allowed Shaw to continue. If he’d been right and the virus would have affected humans differently. I would...I didn’t want to become obsessed, like Shaw. So I quit working with living patients.”

“You don’t like death. So you became a pathologist.” Erik summarised.

The corners of Xavier’s mouth actually twitched at these words, but he shook his head. “I don’t mind death. It’s the dying I have a problem with.”

“What about Shaw?”

“He tried to contact me a few times, but I didn’t respond. I tried to forget the whole thing - until you came along.”

_“I need him, I need Xavier.”_

_“We’re doing well.”_

_“We’re not, Emma. We’re stabbing in the dark here. This could take us ages, you know I’m not a patient man..”_

So that’s why Xavier's name had sounded familiar…

“It’s still a stretch. I pop up in your morgue and your first guess is-”

“Coming back from death, mysteriously healing wounds, pallor, reduced body temperature and then there is the eating-brains-part. That narrowed it down quite a lot.”

Erik tried the first sip of his tea, even if to him it tasted like nothing but hot water.

“Magnus. I know that what happened to you is...it’s my fault. I can’t imagine what you have gone through, but in the end it was because of my idea. And I want to help you.”

His eyes were wide and beseeching and Erik had to remind himself that he couldn’t believe him.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It was-”

“And I believe you,” Erik lied.

 

* * *

 

 

Xavier's story was good. But it didn’t explain why Erik had woken up in the morgue. In fact, if Xavier was actually telling the truth, circumstances had become even stranger.

What were the odds of him waking up in the one morgue where the genetics professor-turned-pathologist worked who had a hand in creating him?

Erik turned on the bed couch Xavier had prepared for him, trying not to feel uncomfortable between clean sheets and beneath the thick, soft comforter. His ‘host’ had even lent him pyjamas that were unnaturally soft against his skin and smelled of lilac and fabric softener.

There was something about Xavier that made him want to trust the man, but that didn’t make sense. Xavier was a doctor, a scientist. He had confessed that he was involved in Shaw’s work - that this perversion of nature had even been his own idea. That he considered this mockery of life a way to help people. He couldn’t be trusted.

Erik knew what Xavier really meant, when he said he wanted to help him, to cure him.

What he meant was that he planned on using him as a test subject for his little theory, he meant that he would tie him down on some metal table, cut, stab him, poke him with needles, push him into ice-water, he meant taking Erik apart to find out what made him tick.

He wouldn’t allow that. Never again.

When Shaw would contact again and then Erik would be there and he’d find him and force him to reverse what he had done to Erik.

Either way, Erik would kill him. He would have his revenge.

One floor above him, Erik could hear the squeaking of old bed springs. Xavier was lying down, apparently trusting his ability to fool Erik.

Mindful of making any noise, Erik slipped from the bed couch and navigated the chaos that was Xavier’s living room with the help of his enhanced sight until he found the light switch.

Being able to see in the dark was no reason to strain his eyes.

He began by searching every square millimetre of the room for evidence for or against Xavier. (But favourably against.)

Xavier seemingly didn’t bother hiding his correspondence and Erik decided that that was very suspicious. Who didn’t hide their correspondence? Instead it was scattered all over the living room, bills, requests for consultations, a crumpled invitation for an alumni reunion in the bin, a postcard signed by someone called Raven sent from the Costa Brava propped up on the windowsill, something about a piece of real estate in the United States and various others, uninteresting scraps of information. Which meant the interesting information had to be hidden somewhere else.

He found Xavier’s laptop lying in a seat, but it was password-protected and he seemed to have taken his mobile into his bedroom with him. For lack of better options, Erik snooped through the list of incoming and outgoing calls on his landline. Whoever Raven was, she had called him as well several times. Someone called Hank. Someone called Kurt had called several times, but his calls hadn’t been answered and Xavier had never called him back.

There were numbers saved in the phone, but then Xavier had been too clever to save Shaws number. Or Shaw had been too clever to give out his number and called him instead with orders to delete the call.

He searched through each of the innumerable books in case any of them were hollowed out - it wasn’t the case - looked beneath the carpets, behind the poster of Billie Holiday and inside each journal but still didn’t find anything incriminating.

Kitchen and the bathrooms both down here and on the second floor came back clear as well - the smell of chemical cleaning agents in both bathrooms cut his search there short.

The office on the first floor with the locked bottom drawer in the desk looked promising.

Erik picked it with two straightened out pins from the stapler and pulled it open triumphantly.

Inside was a diploma from Oxford, an acceptance letter responding his resignation and a stack of photos showing Xavier at different stages of his childhood, sitting in front of luxurious houses or inside of them, always with the same, stiff-looking people around them: A woman with the same, sour facial expression but different cocktail gowns in each one, a dark-haired man in a suit and another boy of broader, more muscular built than Xavier.

The drawer also contained a dead calculator and and a single paper clip. Useless.

The other drawers weren’t any more helpful and Erik concluded that Xavier had given up this office in favour of cluttering his living room with anything that should go in here. Another cupboard containing a disconcerting number of bottles of liquor. For an instant, Erik pictured himself holding an intervention for Xavier.

After checking the hallway for loose floorboards - none - he came to a halt in front of Xavier’s bedroom door, listening to the slightly irregular breathing of REM sleep.

What he needed was Xavier’s mobile.

Without a sound, he turned the doorknob to Xavier’s bedroom and slipped inside - he hadn’t even locked it. His confidence in his ability to fool Erik was rather insulting.

To his eyes the pitch black bedroom appeared in shades of grey.

Xavier was lying in his king-sized bed, curled up beneath a patterned duvet, one hand fisting his pillow and sleeping soundly.

Erik scanned the rest of the room - more shelves with more books, another one next to the telly with DVDs, a cupboard, Xavier’s clothes were spread out on a chair underneath the window.

Keeping his eyes on the sleeping man in the bed, he picked up his mobile and went through it.

More calls from Raven. Messages from “Raven” (pictures of an otter wearing a hat, Erik decided it was too dumb to be a secret code and not endearing at all), “Hank” (asking whether Xavier had recommendations for a birthday present for Raven), people called Moira (pictures of the remnants of her shoe, apparently courtesy of her dog), Darwin (Xavier had cancelled a paintball tournament just a few hours ago), Alex (“You can’t not come again! Paintball is a tradition!”), three dating apps in which Xavier had never answered a single message sent to him by numerous men and women, work-related e-mails, an almost blank facebook page and nothing suspicious at all.

Carelessly, Erik dropped the mobile back onto the nightstand, loud enough to make Xavier stir in his sleep, but not to wake him.

He conducted a quick search of Xavier’s bathroom, hoping to find cigarettes as well as anything suspicious but came back empty-handed on both accounts.

Sneaking back out into the hallway and down the stairs, he considered his plan of action.

Nothing of what he found contradicted Xavier’s story - he’d been to and taught at Oxford University, he was a scientist of some capacity, knew about Shaw and now he worked in a morgue.

But it didn’t make sense, none of it did, because if Xavier’s story were true, then he had no reason to help Erik. It had to be a trap, a way to gain his trust somehow to currently indiscernible ends.

There had to be a reason why Erik had found himself in Xavier’s morgue after the three days he had lost, so there had to be a connection. If he wanted to find out what happened in his missing 72 hours he would need to find out what Xavier actually wanted of him.

The clock in the kitchen showed 2 am, when Erik got to work, tidying up the chaos he made of the living room during his search. It was past three, when Erik accepted that he had no memory of how to rearrange the current state of mess back into Xavier’s former state of mess and found himself sorting journals and carelessly shoving books into shelves and binning old empty bottles, because he was an idiot.

 

* * *

 

"You're a amazing."

Erik pretended to wake up. It had been difficult, staying awake and listening for any suspicious noises around the house when he couldn’t remember when he’d last spent a night as comfortable as this one.

“I...I mean, you didn’t have to, obviously. I would have gotten around to it. But...you did a great job.”

Xavier was dressed in an actual dressing gown, a flowing, silky thing, his wet curls sticking to his forehead and he smelled of bergamot, shaving cream and something soft, earthy that had to be his own, individual smell.

There was a red line standing out from the pale skin of Xavier’s neck, where Erik had pressed the blade of the filet knife against it last night and a slight bruise below his cheekbone. Erik felt a vague sense of guilt because of it - or because Xavier seemed content pretending none of that had happened or was any more noteworthy than Erik cleaning up his living room. Maybe he thought this an apology of sorts.

“This...is brilliant. But you really, really shouldn’t have.”

“It bothered me.” Erik said and shrugged, trying to shake off the blankets that had wrapped around his body in his sleep.

“I’m sorry...I know I’ve been…” Xavier trailed off, looked around his living room once more and then back at Erik. “Bathroom is free...if you want. I’ll make breakfast. And then we’ll make plans.”

“What plans?”

Erik’s only plans for the day had been to pluck up some courage and perhaps manage to visit a single service in the next synagogue, hiding away in the last bench. Now of course, he had Xavier to keep an eye on and unwittingly giving him the excuse he needed to turn tail. Conveniently, he could at the same time blame his ruined New Year on Charles. He decided to dislike him even more for that.  
  
"How we can get your...little problem under control.”

 

__

* * *

 

 

Xavier’s bathroom smelled of antiseptic, it drowned everything out and the pale, sterile light reflected by the tiles on the wall reminded him of…

 

_struggling against the restraints, trying to get away, Shaw’s face hovering above him, he was speaking, his mouth was moving, but Erik couldn’t make out a word he said, couldn’t hear him over the screaming, the screaming that was everywhere, but Erik didn’t know who it was, who was screaming like that…_  
  


_A hand slapped him across the face and the screaming stopped._

_“...the acid again, I want to see what that healing factor can really do…”_

 

Banging against the door brought Erik back into the present, the present where he was curled into a ball on the bottom of Xavier’s tub, protecting his face with his hands from the water falling from the showerhead.

“Are you alright in there?”

Erik pressed his teeth together and waited until he could  trust himself to speak.

“Magnus? You’ve been in there for over forty minutes.”

He had lost time. Again. Time in which Xavier could have done anything, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

“I’m fine.” Didn’t sound convincing, even to his own ears.

Hesitation on the other side of the door.

“Alright. Breakfast is ready...when you are…”

Forcing the shaky feeling his flashbacks left him with to the back of his mind to deal with never at all, he finished his shower and got dressed as quickly as possible, relishing in the illusion of safety the numerous layers of two shirts, a sweater and his hoodie granted him.  
  
Downstairs, Xavier was no longer dressed in his blue dressing gown, but had changed into another pale three-piece-suit that made him look like a child dressed in his father’s clothes.

“Ah, there you are.” He had the audacity to appear delighted that Erik was standing in his kitchen. Actually, he seemed more pleased with Erik’s presence than most people had been back when he'd still been alive. But instead of grabbing a rolling pin and beating the truth about his ulterior motive out of him the old-fashioned way, Erik watched the man pour a cup of coffee and push mushed eggs around in a pan on the stove.

“I made baked beans, they should be cold by now, if you want them. There's toast as well, but you might have to scratch off some black bits.”

Erik glanced at the solid, black squares on a plate.

“It won't kill me.” Mostly, he wasn't sure how much toast there'd be left, if he did scratch off the ashes.

Xavier sat down opposite to him, actually placed a napkin in his lap and helped himself to some of his baked beans, before addressing the zombie in the room.

“May I ask - how long have you been like this?”

“A zombie, you mean.”

Xavier winced at the word - or maybe the beans tasted as bad as they smelled.

“We need to come up with a better word for your...condition.”

So it was the word.

“I eat brains. It’s a pretty good word.”

“So - how long have you been a _zombie_ then?” Dismay at that word was evident in Xavier's voice.

Focussing his attention on the task of spreading the jam on his burnt toast, he managed to avoid the wide, blue eyes. “I don’t know. I couldn’t always keep track of time in the labs.”

Putting down his full spoon, Xavier directed his entire attention on Erik.

“How long were you in these labs, Magnus?”

_“It’s too late, Erik. You belong to me now.”_

There were little pips in the raspberry jam and Erik focussed on scrambling them this way and that with his knife.

“Long enough.”

“I’ll need to reconstruct as much of Shaw’s procedures as possible, if I am to reverse it. I need to know everything you know.”

The toast tasted of nothing, just like anything else did to Erik, but he took his time chewing. He didn’t want to speak of the labs, he didn’t even want to think of the labs. And especially not today. And what if this was, what Xavier was after? Information? Perhaps what he was really after was a recipe for his zombie army? And didn’t that make sense, possibly the story he had told Erik was true and he had been working with Shaw and after the apparent failure Shaw had contacted him, boasting about his most successful test subject and then Xavier had found him, tricked him into following the wrong man, had him knocked out and brought into the very morgue he was working in and now he tried to gain his trust with the promise of a cure and the steady access to fresh brain matter...

“I was drugged, most of the time, You can’t rely on my memory.”

With his brow slightly furrowed, Xavier was studying him, his eyes not leaving Erik’s for seconds that felt like hours, before he slowly picked up his spoon again.

“When you remember anything… tell me.”

“I will.”

Xavier finished his breakfast off with an apple - the green kind that Erik hadn’t liked even when he could taste them - carefully carving out small slices and placing them on his tongue. Noticing Erik’s eyes on him, he held out the apple and the knife.

“Do you want some?” He inquired innocently.

Erik thought of eating apples dipped in honey in the backroom of a small apartment in Garath, reciting prayers with his parents, asking to be renewed with the new year.

He no longer had his faith and yet the thought of sharing badly mutilated apples with a stranger in his kitchen felt like betrayal.

Something about the way he shook his head must have been too fervent and Xavier feigned hurt when he retracted his offer.

“Can’t taste it anyway.”

For an instant, Xavier’s shoulders sank.

 

* * *

 

 

The one thing about Xavier was-

He talked.

There always seemed to be something that needed talking about and Erik couldn't tell whether Xavier talked too much or whether he just wasn't used to that much interaction anymore.

The other thing about Xavier was...

He touched Erik. Without any reservations, he put his hand on Erik’s arm, shoulder or the small of his back, just fleeting touches through several layers of clothes and yet Erik could feel the warmth tingling beneath his skin, even after Xavier had removed his hand.

On their way back to the hospital, Xavier seemed to think nothing of the way their shoulders kept bumping against the other's or about putting his hand on Erik’s elbow to get his attention. He knew, that he couldn’t infect Xavier touch alone, but sometimes he felt as if his illness was seeping through the fabric, poisoning that one friendly touch after years of deprivation. Pushing that thought to the back of his mind, he reminded himself that Xavier wasn't his friend, he was manipulating him, trying to gain his trust...

Xavier’s hand found his forearm again to show him the stairs towards the morgue and Erik suppressed the instinct to pull away.

 

* * *

 

 

“I could get us an exam room.” Xavier proposed, removing an elder man’s spleen from his chest with a well-practiced movement and dropping it into the bowl sitting on top of the scales behind him.

“There's no need. I'm dead, I fit right in with your usual clientele.”

The man’s spleen weighed 6.3 ounces, as Xavier ordered him to note down. According to Xavier, his presence here meant that he couldn't film his post mortems, which meant Erik was put to work. Work meaning that he found himself sitting in an uncomfortable office-chair with his legs propped up onto one of the tables, scribbling down Xavier’s findings and resisting the temptations to go look for some brain himself...He'd swear Xavier was doing this to torment him, pulling one insignificant organ from the man’s torso after the other instead of finally opening his skull.

Erik put down “179 grams”, just to spite the man.

“You're not dead.”

“My heart says otherwise.”

“You're walking, you're talking, your brain seems mostly intact. You're not dead. Exam room 3 is usually free, even during clinic hours.” Another organ landed in the bowl. “Pancreas is slightly enlarged. 4.6 ounces.”

Erik put down 130 grams.

“I like the stench of death and decay down here. I feel right at home.”

Wrist-deep in the man’s torso again, Xavier took his time to answer.

“Most people find this place unsettling,” Xavier finally said. “Sometimes I do as well.”

“I’m not most people. I’m not even people. I’m a zombie.” He snapped his teeth for good measure.

The only answer he got from Xavier was a non-committal grunt from behind tightened lips, which might also have been directed at what he pulled out of the man’s chest next, something not red and squishy but silver and solid. A bullet.

“He was shot?”

“Yes. World War 2, judging by his age.  In many cases, when in the field, leaving the bullet inside was safer than removing it. It was in there for all this time. And there was nothing wrong with that. Until he developed an allergy against copper.”

“We should tell someone. Maybe they can find the guy who shot him and pin a medal on him - for the _fatherland_.”

“You don’t like the military?”

Erik shrugged. “Don’t like soldiers. Don’t like anyone who shoots at others because someone told them to.”

Working alongside another human being felt strange, even if it was at something as morbid as dissecting a human body and weighing and measuring his inner organs. It tasted of a world beyond pain and hunger, beyond revenge and beyond Shaw. A world he thought he had forgotten, but Xavier had to make him remember…

Erik mindlessly wrote down the numbers Xavier told him to and helped him return the dead soldier to his cool chamber and clean the table, barely even thinking about the man’s unopened skull.

“And you’re sure about this?” Xavier asked, pulling a metal drawer cart over to the table between them. “The exam rooms are just…”

Erik cut him off before he could repeat his suggestion.

“Let’s get started.”


	4. Deep Breath

 

Erik wasn’t ashamed of his naked body. Such kind of shame had been ripped away from him, ripped from him in that time in Shaw’s lab, civil comforts buried beneath a world of other horrors. And yet...

“I’ll need you to take your shirt off.”

...and yet, even with only his shirt off, he had to brace his hands against the edge of the metal table behind him to hide their trembling.

It wasn’t rational. He knew it wasn’t. Xavier had seen him in the nude before, had seen everything, had seen him dead on a slab.

“It’s just a needle," Xavier told him, and there was the warm pressure of his hand on Erik’s elbow again, apparently trying to appear comforting. “Barely hurts.”

Erik bit back a snort. He’d been pricked, prodded, cut into and electrocuted too often to count, he wasn’t scared of any pain. He just couldn’t pinpoint what it was that he was scared of. Why he felt as if his lungs couldn’t get enough air even if he didn’t need to breathe.

“Are you sure you’re alright with this?”

“Just get on with it.”

Xavier kept looking at him and Erik was just about to snarl at him to get started, when he pressed the needle against the crook of Erik’s arm and he had to watch the needle sink in. The pressure on his lungs felt heavier now and he tried to think of how Xavier looked nothing like Shaw, how his features were concerned and focussed on the task at hand rather than cruel with barely concealed glee at Erik’s suffering. It would be easy, overpowering Xavier, he was smaller than Erik and this time he wasn’t restrained and stronger than he had ever been, Xavier couldn’t do anything to him…

“Now, that’s disappointing.”

The vial attached to the needle was empty.

“I don’t bleed much, these days.” Which he could have told him earlier, coming to think of it.

“That’s alright.”

It wasn’t, because suddenly there was Xavier’s hand on his chest just above the heart, slowly massaging downwards towards his elbow, his touch feverishly hot against Erik’s cold skin and he had to force himself to keep still, even if he couldn’t tell whether his body wanted to shrink away from the warm touch or lean into it. Couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched any part of him in any way that wasn’t accidental brushes, manhandling or driven by the intent to hurt.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to move blood from the veins surrounding your heart down into your arm.” Xavier explained, repeating the same movements mechanically and continuously, seemingly unaware of Erik’s struggle. Thinking of this as a strictly medical procedure made his hands tremble stronger and his throat close up further. Thinking of the human touch against his skin as anything else clouded his mind and sent a shaky feeling through his breast, a fluttering like a faint mockery of the heartbeat he no longer had, a phantom pain of a feeling he could barely remember.

“Ah, there we go.”

Slow drips of dark-red blood started filling the vial. Erik tried to think of anything but Shaw pushing one needle after another into his body, about more tubes than he could count transporting fluids into and away from his body…

“Magnus?” Now both of Xavier’s hands were on his shoulders. “Are you still with me?”

Erik nodded, averting his eyes when Xavier slipped out the needle. “All done.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, he pulled an actual plaster and put it onto the crook of Erik’s arm, smoothing it with his thumb. Erik added that to his mental list of things that made Xavier strangely endearing - then he made a point of mentally burning the list. He knew better than to trust people and far better than to trust doctors.

From a table to his left, Xavier picked up a stethoscope and Erik found himself wondering whether it was the same stethoscope he had used to distract Xavier when he first woke up before beating him unconscious with the lamp.

Apparently Xavier had the same thought.

“Please don’t hit me again.”

“I’ll try not to.”

The diaphragm only felt cold against his chest for a split-second, before it adapted to his already low body temperature.

“Deep breath.”

Erik went through the motions of breathing, in and out as much as he could, again and again, while Xavier placed his diaphragm in various places and talked Erik through the process as if he were a child. Or an actual patient entitled to informed consent. It was a staggering experience.

“I’m not sure what work your lungs are doing at the moment. You’re clearly still breathing, but without a heartbeat, I’m not sure how the oxygen reaches your cells.”

Xavier’s hands were still brushing against his skin here and there, sending a strange tingling through Erik’s body and he had to fight the strange desire to lean into this touch. Just another way Xavier had found to worm himself into Erik’s mind, using his touch-starved body against him.

“Now, please turn around.”

It was harder than it should be, turning his back to Xavier, but all the pathologist did was order him again to take the same deep breaths and place the diaphragm of his stethoscope all over his back.

“By the way. Are you finally ready to tell me how you ended up in my morgue?”

Smooth.

“Don’t remember. Got mugged, probably.”

“You don’t seem like a person easy to mug.”

“How can you listen to me breathe, when you talk so much?”

The diaphragm disappeared from naked skin.

“Oh, I’m finished with that," Instead Xavier spread his fingers out on Erik’s back, rubbing circles and pressing here and there. Erik forced himself not to shudder. “I’m looking for any abnormalities of the density of your inner organs,” He continued. “The MRI will tell us more, but I cannot make any promises as to how long that will take. We’ll have to do it under a false name and find a radiologist who doesn’t ask too many questions - and they’re a chatty lot. Perhaps I’ll have to do it all by myself.”

Erik hated the effect Xavier’s voice had on him, but somehow his rambling was actually comforting in a situation in which he shouldn’t feel comfortable at all. There was something about Xavier that was eating away at him, making his guard slip…

“Very good, everything feels just like it should - except so cold you should technically be dead, of course, but other than that splendid. Please turn around again.”

When he’d thought it was difficult to turn his back to Xavier, he hadn’t known how hard it would be to face him and his soft, blue eyes again, staring right up at his face and Erik couldn’t find his tell, the sign that gave away the kindness and concerns written into the lines on his face as falseness.

Instead he focussed on the hands wandering up and down the front of his body, prodding and poking him.

“I think he drugged me.”

“What was that?”

“The man who mugged me. I lost three days. I think he drugged me with something after tasing me. The next thing I know is I’m waking up in the morgue.”

Xavier’s hands came to a rest, both his thumbs poking around somewhere above his liver.

“We can do a drug test as well. That should tell us what he used on you.” Xavier suggested, and his fingers started wandering again, each soft touch a warm dagger. “Where did it happen?”

“Why?”

“A friend of mine has access to the CCTV. Since going to the police is out of the question for you, we could ask him to have a look for us. Figure out where they brought you.”

He should say no, he knew he should, but wasn’t that what he had come back to the morgue for? To figure out what had happened during the days he lost? He just wouldn’t allow Xavier to trick him in whatever way he was planning to.

“Sounds good.”

Xavier smiled gently, just the slightest curvature of his lips, and let his hands venture lower along Erik’s sides, pressing down here and there.

_“You don’t like that, do you?” Shaw’s fingers against his skin pushed through the thick, white fog surrounding his mind. “Come on now, try and stop me.”_

“Magnus.” That voice wasn’t Shaw’s and he tried to focus on that, tried to focus on its warmth and the wide, blue eyes before him. A hand closed itself around his shoulder.

_Erik struggled against the restraints, trying to shake off the fingers trailing down his side, but the restraints didn’t give a single inch. He was pinned down and helpless, his jaw snapping helplessly and uncontrollably at nothing._

“Magnus, if you want us to take a break, we can do that.”

The blue eyes were before him again, concerned and deep enough to drown in, _but then there was a flash of silver coming from the man’s hand and he couldn’t escape, couldn’t move away, when the scalpel cut through layer after layer of his skin, he couldn’t even squirm in the restraints, couldn’t scream with the muzzle forced down his throat, making him gag. His muscles were contracting and decontracting in harsh spasms, except his torso, where neuromuscular blockers paralysed his muscles but none of the sensation, and he tried to scream around the muzzle in his mouth, coughing and choking and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t they see that he couldn’t breathe, he could feel a thousand, burning daggers stabbing his chest, piercing his lungs…_

“It’s not real.”

_A man in silver glasses above his surgical mask tutted and shook his head, pressing another scalpel against the front of Erik’s neck, saying something he couldn’t make sense of..._

“Magnus, whatever you are seeing, it isn’t real...”

_The blade cut through his skin deep into his neck and Erik could only watch another man handing the surgeon a clear tube…_

“Please…”

The voice...it didn’t fit in the picture, didn’t belong with what was happening...what wasn’t happen, what had already happened, what had stopped happening, what would never stop happening…

He could smell peppermint and bergamot and death, none of which had a place here. But it had to be real, because there was the familiar sting of hunger again, the now constant backdrop of his non-life.

“Magnus, you’re with me. Charles Xavier. We’re in the morgue.”

He didn’t remember closing his eyes, but they were pressed shut when he tried to look around for the source of the voice. Opening them, he found Xavier right before him, blue-eyed and smelling of bergamot.

Somehow they had ended up on the floor, Erik with his back pressed against the wall and Xavier looming over him in a crouching position.

What had just happened hang in the air between them, heavy and tangible, until Xavier took it onto himself to say something, even if he looked visibly uncomfortable doing so.

“We should get some fresh air.”

“I’m hungry.” The words slipped out before he could hold them back, sounding childish even to his own ears, but Xavier just nodded and after a quick, meaningful pat on Erik’s shoulder - not that he found himself able to decipher what it meant - he set himself to work, talking on as usual. Sometimes Erik wasn't even sure Xavier was talking with him rather than with himself.

“I'll have to teach you how to use the saw at some point. I will rather not tell you what I had to do to piece Ms. Abati’s skull back together after...you opened it.”

Part of Erik actually felt insulted, because he found he'd done quite a good job with the saw, but Xavier proved capable of opening the head of his body of choice without getting splinters of skull everywhere, so perhaps he was on to something. The smell of brain matter made his stomach rebel with need and the hunger felt strangely invigorating, reviving him enough to pull himself back onto his feet. He hesitated to walk up to Xavier, but instead inspected his work from safe distance. The idea of being close to another being had suddenly become terrifying. Somewhere just beneath his skin he could feel the tingling of fingertips, but he couldn't tell which were Xavier’s and which were reaching from him from the realm of memory, grabbing him and holding him down.

“I think I still have a sandwich in the fridge.” Xavier mused, while carefully dislodging the occipital lobe from the skull and dropping it into another bowl, before pushing the meringes back and replaced the removed part of the skull. But just before Erik had the opportunity to plan his angle of attack and rip the delicious chunk of meat from Xavier’s hands, the pathologist turned away, bowl still in his hand and headed for the little office in the corner. Erik used the opportunity to reach for his discarded shirts and hoodie, feeling irrationally safer with three layers of fabric between himself and the world.

Regarding the body before him, the _foodneedhunger_ grew stronger, clawing at his insides to just reach into the man’s skull with his bare hands and feed himself, it was so tempting, his hunger almost turning into a physical entity, located somewhere below his solar plexus and filling him, a void consuming him from the inside and it became impossible to move away, until…

“There.”

There was a hand on his elbow and Xavier was next to him again, holding up a plate with a sandwich of something that smelled distinctly like…

“You put him on a sandwich…” Although Erik couldn’t deny a morbid spark of appreciation… “You sick bastard.” Between two slices of French bread was some salad and the occipital lope Xavier had prepared for him.

“I thought that would be a more dignified for everyone involved.”

“He might disagree.” Erik suggested.

“I wouldn’t want anyone to dig around my brain and eat it out with their bare hands.”

“So you would prefer to end up on a sandwich?”

Xaver swallowed visibly.

“I’d...I’d prefer not to think about it, actually.”

Nevertheless, Erik adhered to his opinion that Xavier and anyone else who thought putting a brain on a sandwich was a good idea was by definition a 'sick fuck’. Which seemed to include him, because the longer he looked at this, the more his mouth watered. Maybe he could try imagine the taste of an actual sandwich with something other than human brain matter - chicken.

Once again Xavier came between Erik and his food - Erik decided that if he couldn’t hold back one day and bit him for that, it would the man’s own darn fault - and steered him with another warm, living hand on Erik’s back towards the exit.

Steering Erik down a hallway he hadn’t taken before and up a set of stairs, he didn’t know, Xavier led him out into what looked like a secluded area of the parking lot between a line of bicycles and a colourful agglomeration of dustbins.

“Tasteful.”

“It’s where the nurses go when they sneak out for a smoke during their shifts.” Xavier explained while Erik made himself comfortable on a small wall segregating a delivery entrance from the rest of the parking lot. Visibly hesitant, Xavier followed suit, but Erik couldn’t tell whether it was the seating arrangement that bothered him or what he was about to witness. And with the hunger snarling and clawing away inside him, he couldn’t bring himself to care. No one who put a human brain onto a sandwich had the right to judge him.

To his credit, Xavier didn’t avert his eyes, didn’t even blink, when Erik buried his teeth in the food and wolfed it down. For a few precious moments the hunger withdrew its claws and he could enjoy the immediate effects the brain had on its body. His mind became clearer, every ache in his body faded and the constant noise of the city was reduced to an almost comforting backdrop to the warmth he felt spreading out inside his body and taking over each and every sense. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t taste it, that he had forgotten what chicken was like or that Xavier was watching him, what mattered was food, what mattered was that that stinging in his stomach had lifted just for a second, what mattered was licking the last white chunks of brain matter from his fingers until they were clean.

His body was jittery with the anticipation of more and all his senses screamed that there was more, that there was more human, more brain, more food, more peace sitting right beside him, but he tried to force his need down, pressing his shivering hands flat onto his thighs.

There were still crumbs on the plate in his lap. From the right angle he could almost convince himself that they were splatters of brain…

“How are you feeling?”

When he turned his head, Charles was still looking him at him, not with the disgust he’d expected. The expression on his face resembled interest.

The question was still hovering between them and nano-second after nano-second was ticking by. He had to answer something, but he wasn’t sure how to answer, how to put into words how the hunger felt, how it had become an almost physical, living thing that wanted to claw its way out of Erik’s chest, a wild animal loose to find its own prey, or how the first bite felt when bliss washed over him, the afterglow when every single cell in his body was brimming with the short-lived relief of being fed.

“Better?” Charles supplied inquiringly.

With his brow slightly furrowed and his eyes wide, Xavier’s interest almost looked like...Erik tried to place that information, and came up with ‘concern’ - perhaps one of the brains, either Ms. Abati’s or the soldier’s brain had supplied him with that information, he wasn’t used to see concern directed him, but Xavier’s eyes definitely looked like _concern_.

Right. The flashback he had the morgue. Feeding himself had almost made him forgot that humiliation. Of course Xavier looked concerned, because that was the appropriate reaction to seeing someone who could murder you having a violent panic-attack after you poked them in the stomach a little and Xavier was still trying to trap him, trying to make Erik trust him so he had to pretend to be concerned for him as well.

“Better.” He agreed.

Feigned or not, Xavier’s features brightened at that answer and for a while they sat in silence, while Erik picked up crumbs from his plate and swallowed them, even if they tasted of nothing and did nothing to help against his hunger which was already unfurling inside him again. Last time he counted, he still had eight cigarettes left in the pack in his pocket, but he didn’t want to waste one and smoke it when he’d just eaten. They took the edge of his hunger when it was at its worst and that’s when he needed them.

Soon enough, Xavier started prattling about something again and Erik let his voice wash over him, answering the occasional question with a hum that didn’t sound either affirmative nor contradictory.

“You’re from Germany, right?”

Erik hummed, then hesitated and turned to Xavier.

“What?”

“Forgive me, but you have a slight accent - German, if I’m not mistaken.”

Clearly, Xavier had decided that their relationship had progressed enough to start digging for details about Erik’s past.

“I’m Swiss.” He lied, for good measure.

Xavier tilted his head and for the first time Erik could see something like irritation on the other man’s face.

“No. You’re not Swiss, you’re German.”

“What?”

“We used to go to Switzerland every winter when I was a child. I can tell a Swiss German Accent from a German accent.”

When Erik stood up in one swift movement, Xavier had the decency to flinch back and stop talking. Erik held his empty plate out for Xavier to take.

“If you don't think the determination whether I'm Swiss or German is relevant to curing Zombie, I think we should get back to the part where you poke me with needles.”

“Magnus…”

Dropping the plate into Xavier’s lap he walked off, back towards the door and he could hear Xavier stand up and hurry after him. The whole effect of storming off was ruined when he found that the door wouldn’t open from the outside and he had to wait for Xavier to unlock it for him.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to,” Xavier explained while digging for the keys in the pockets of his labcoat. “But you don’t need to lie to me.”

At that Erik snorted as he headed towards the morgue before Xavier can even open the door fully.

Never had a post-feeding afterglow faded so fast and it only felt perfectly sensible to blame Xavier for it.

 

* * *

 

 

It was awkward.

The disagreement was lingering between them. Erik knew that Xavier wasn’t actually angry - of course he wasn’t angry, he was probably trying to guilt trip Erik into telling him the truth for whatever ulterior motive he had - but rather seemed disappointed.

There was as much space between them as the morgue allowed with Xavier sitting in the little office in the corner and doing paperwork and Erik inspecting a cupboard with various surgical instruments, absent-mindedly wondering how they would feel on him - if they had ever been used on him during his time in the labs, the memory clouded by whatever cocktail of drugs had been coursing through his system then.

Annoyed by his own train of thought, he tossed them onto a tray on the nearby table. In the corner of his eye, he could see Xavier wince at the sound the delicate equipment made at the rough treatment, but he didn’t say anything.

Which was unfortunate, because it left Erik with the question how to strike up conversation and get back into Xavier’s good graces and then focus on finding out how the man connected to Shaw and his three lost days.

He could apologise, make up some new lie and pretend to feel guilty. So that Xavier could pretend to forgive him and Erik could pretend to feel honestly relieved at that.

He was still weighing that option against his pride - he hated giving in, even if he was just pretense - when Xavier stood up and came over with sharp, resolute steps, opened the cupboard and wordlessly started sorting the instruments back into the boxes in which Erik had found them.

“I shouldn’t have lied to you.”

“I shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business," Xavier shrugged, failing to seem indifferent, but he still didn’t look at Erik. “I barely know you. We’re partners, nothing more.”

Xavier looked genuinely hurt. Erik knew he was faking it, had to be faking it - but he still felt bad. He wondered whether either Ms. Abati or the new man had been particularly naive or sensitive people, that Xavier could get to him like that, but it didn’t help when for once he felt something other than hunger in his stomach, something nagging and uncomfortable.

“I’m from Düsseldorf," He finally said. “That’s the truth.”

 

 

Like Pavlov’s dog, Erik had shown the favoured reaction - telling the truth - to the stimuli Xavier had introduced - his pretending to be unhappy. And like the dog he was, he was now being treated to positive reinforcement: Xavier pretending to be pleased.

It wasn’t quite the same as before, there was a certain hesitation before each time Xavier spoke and he seemed less inclined to talk about his personal life, but after Erik had helped him clean up the morgue as well (because apparently he wasn’t only turning into Xavier’s lab rat but also into his maid) Xavier sat him down and told him everything that he had found during his examination.

Which was nothing.

“There is no necrosis or other visible changes anywhere on the skin, all body-functions seem to work...somehow.” Xavier shrugged helplessly at that and looked at Erik as if hoping for an explanation from him. “I’m not sure as of yet how the consumption of human brain matter factors in or how it helps sustain you or whether it really does. And since I don’t know how it works, I cannot recommend stopping its consumption, because it might result in a decline of...physical and mental functionality.”

“In other words - I’m a zombie.”

“I really detest that word.” Xavier confided.

“You’re giving up then.”

Xavier’s head snapped up at that and Erik found he looked...strangely offended.

“I just got started. I promised you that I will find a way to cure you, one way or another. I’m not saying it will be easy - but if there’s anyone who can do it, then it’s me.”

Erik snorted. Such confidence.

“Why?” The question was on his tongue before he could hold it back.

“Because it’s my fault, isn’t it? My idea, my project, my virus. What Shaw did to you is my fault and if you end up biting someone, because this….disease makes you then that would be my fault as well.”

Xavier spoke matter-of-factly, clipped and delivered his words without any expectation for Erik to contradict them and tell him it wasn’t so. Which was good, because it was all undeniably true, except for one thing.

“If I ever bite someone who doesn’t deserve it, then because I was too weak to stop myself. That would be my fault. Not yours.”

Seconds passed by and Xavier only looked at him, the only hint as to what he was feeling a small muscle jumping in his jaw. Erik couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or not or whether he was planning to say anything at all. If Xavier had been about to speak, he was interrupted by a single sharp ring of his phone, informing him that he’d received a message.

Any efforts to peak over Xavier’s shoulder turned out to be needless, as he handed Erik his mobile readily for him to read the message.

‘ _ **Come over at 7:30. I’ll be home then**_.’

“It’s from Hank. I told you, I have a friend who can access the CCTV. I wrote him and he told me we’d need to hurry, because if there are no reports of any crimes, footages may be deleted automatically.” Xavier summarised.

The phone buzzed again.

‘ _ **Where was your friend mugged?**_ ’

Xavier started typing ‘West Acton’, but Erik interrupted him.

“Sulgrave Road. Near Goldhawk Road.” There. Honesty.

Typing away faster on the phone’s display than Erik could ever imagine being able to, Xavier sent the corrected address and receives prompt answers.

‘ _ **(Y)**_ ’

Whatever that meant. Could be a secret code...maybe he was just about to walk into the trap Charles had set for him.

‘ ** _I’ll have the footage ready_**.’

If this was the trap Xavier had in mind, then it was a good one. Taunting him with another breadcrumb that might lead the way to what had happened to him in those three days. After all, that was the reason why he put up with Xavier in the first place.

“I didn’t fill him in on all the details. I told him friend of mine got mugged and can’t go to the police because of personal reasons. You will have to think about something, in case he asks.”

“I presume ‘Rogue Zombie’ isn’t the best answer?”

“I’ll leave it to you.”

Xavier still finished his paperwork, but did so in the same room as Erik and kept him updated on anything that concerned him - that he’d arrange an MRI under the name of one of their coma patients, that he’d run the blood-tests first thing tomorrow on his own, that he would study human brains to find out which part of their make-up was so vital to sustaining Erik and whether it could be synthesised and that everything was still open and that he could find an answer to this and that Erik shouldn’t worry.

“It will be fine.”

Erik made a noise of agreement.

 

* * *

 

 

Xavier’s shift ended at 5pm, interrupting Erik’s efforts to familiarise himself with Xavier’s smartphone under the guise of playing a game revolving around feeding a strange furry creature which Xavier apparently deemed a sensible way of spending his time, judging by his high-score.

On the other hand - Xavier seemed to think feeding Erik was a sensible thing to do as well.

‘Hank’, Xavier explained, lived in the suburbs together with Xavier’s sister 'Raven' which would be almost a one-hour-drive and that if they were lucky.

This had to be the trap that was waiting for him.

While Xavier was hanging his lab coat on a hook in the wall and changing back into the matching waistcoat and and single-breasted jacket of his suit, Erik used his distraction to slip one of the surgical knives into the front pocket of his hoodie.

 

* * *

 

 

“I must say, I feel like I’m starving,” Xavier said on their short way back to his house. As if he knew anything about hunger. “We should grab something to eat on our way back.”

Xavier managed to sound casual, as is there were coming back - coming back together. “What would you like?”

_...rip out the throat of the man getting out of a cab next to them, bash his head into the pavement, crack it open and eat his brains right from the ground..._

“Magnus?”

Erik tried to think about it, but decisions on the finer things of life came difficult to him these days. Even if the offers weren’t real.

“Anything is fine.”

“Hmm...I’m thinking Chinese. Haven’t had Chinese in a while…”

Erik’s stomach gave a traitorous, hungry pang and Erik reached for his cigarette and lit one, earning him a look from Xavier.

He held the pack out, but Xavier shook his head.

“It’s unhealthy.” There was judgement in his voice, a kind of judgement that spoke of personal history. Erik wondered whether someone he knew had died of lung cancer or any other result of an addiction.

“Can hardly kill me.” Inhaling the smoke as deep as he could into his lungs, Erik put the pack back into his pocket. “And it helps against the hunger.”

Xavier winced. “I’m sorry. Would you like me to stop mentioning food?”

_A whimper forced its way up from Erik’s throat when the knife cut through the oozing meat and the smell of blood filled his nose. With his hands cuffed behind his back the only thing he could do to get closer to the source of the delicious smell was press his face against the bars of the cage, closer to Shaw's indifferent face._

_“Should I stop? Does this bother you?” He could barely hear Shaw’s silky voice over the blood rushing in his ears and the involuntary snapping of his teeth...when had that started? He found himself doing that often now…_

_Shaw brought the fork to his mouth and moaned around the bite._

_“This is amazing...might be the best I’ve ever eaten. It’s just right...and the texture...Herr im Himmel....but really, Erik. You must tell me, if I should stop?”_

“Magnus?”

Something heavy collided with his shoulder…

“Oi! Watch where you’re going, mate!”

Reality set in and brushed illusion aside like a curtain. The man he’d run into - or who’d run into him - gave him the typical two-fingered salute of an displeased Englishman and marched on, ignoring the short string of German cursing yelled his way.

A hand reached for Erik’s arm and his head whipped around, only to come face to face with Xavier and his concerned eyes.

“What?” Erik demanded.

Part of him expected Xavier to ask him again whether he was ‘alright’ or ‘how he was feeling’, because that seemed to be his strategy for winning Erik over, pretending it he cared how he felt, pretending Erik mattered.

Instead…

“We’re there. This is my car.”

At the side of the street stood a gleaming black saloon car, a Lexus with a parking ticket sticking out from beneath one of the windscreen-wipers, which Xavier removed with an indignant huff before unlocking the doors.

Paying no mind to Xavier’s scrutiny, Erik got as much as he could of the rest out of his cigarette, inhaling as deeply, before dropping it onto the pavement carelessly and getting into the equally gleaming insides of Xavier’s car, the smell of authentic leather and air freshener filling his nose. Every single thing about this car said that Xavier was far wealthier than a pathologist in London should be. This money had to come from somewhere...from someone.

Erik made a mental note to investigate the source of Xavier’s wealth.

Several bright displays lit up when Xavier started the car, making him feel more as if he was in the cockpit of a plane than sitting inside a car.

“Destination: Raven and Hank.”

Erik was just about to ask Xavier why he was telling him that, when a screen popped up on one of the displays, informing them that the route was being calculated - Erik caught sight of an address too, at 102 Mount Pleasant which was just a idiotic street name, if anyone asked him, but no one ever did.

While Erik tried not to think of the last time he sat in such a car or about how much value this car had probably lost due to his presence inside it alone, Xavier began a long-winded attempt at merging into the traffic, a process that was interrupted by the car’s many displays starting to beep and flash manically. For the sake of his pride he hoped Xavier hadn’t seen him flinch. Right. Cars did that nowadays. It’s been a long time since he sat in one.

“You need to put on a seatbelt.” Xavier pointed out without looking at him.

“Or what? I could get hurt?”

“Or it will just keep beeping.”

That was a compelling argument, and he had to swallow down a sigh of relief when he he put the seatbelt on and the beeping died down.

Xavier, it turned out, was a horrible driver, mostly driving at a snail's pace on the left lane. A few times Erik contemplated just asking him to pull over and let him drive, but he’d rather not risk this car by gathering his first-ever right-hand driving experiences in one of London’s rush hours. Instead he endured it. Barely.

“Have you tried appetite suppressants?” Xavier asked while slowing down in an approach on a green traffic light, as if suspicious of it.

“Usually I take them by the handful. Got a shoebox full of them back at home.”

For a split-second Xavier dared to take his eyes off the green traffic light and glance at Erik, before facing forward again.

“What?” Erik snapped.

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just...I didn’t realise you had a home.” Xavier admitted, strangely apologetic.

“You thought I was homeless?”

“Well...London is expensive. And with your...affliction I didn’t think it was likely you could sustain a life here,” He explained. “That and you’re a man in his thirties wearing a hoodie.”

“You’re pretty full of it, aren’t you?”

To his surprise, Erik felt the corner of his mouth twitch and somehow Xavier managed to turn his head just then and catch sight of it, answering with an actual, unperturbed smile of his own that made wrinkles appear around his eyes and made something tug at Erik’s insides that wasn’t hunger. It was strange, seeing someone smile at him like that.

Schooling his face back into an expressionless mask, he turned away from Xavier to look out of the window to his left, watching the world pass by much too slow for his liking.

If Xavier was coess peoplnnected to the man who had attacked him, then he knew exactly where Erik lived and this was part of this scheme. And yet there was a tiny part of him that wondered whether Xavier was being honest, whether he’d really thought that Erik didn’t have a place to go and offered his under the guise of pure medical interest. Erik smothered that pathetic thought with all his might. No one was helpful like that, and opened their own home to a monster without ulterior motive. Xavier lived in London of all places. If he wanted to help the homeless, he wouldn’t have to wait for one to pop up inside his morgue. These doubts were nothing but Xavier’s manipulations starting to work on him. He knew better than that.

“We can stop by your place on our way back," Xavier suggested. “You can grab your pills and anything else you might need. If you want to go back home with me at all. I mean I understand it, if you wouldn’t, but you’re welcome, of course.”

So he was still trying to trick Erik into believing they’d return together.

“Sounds good.”

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr: langernameohnebedeutung.tumblr.com


End file.
